Our home town Christmas tree, Union Square, San Francisco Jewish holidays fall broadly into two categories – those confirming the greatness of Jehovah (Yom Kippur) and those celebrating the unlikely survival of the Jewish people against lopsided odds (Passover). The major Jewish holidays are Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in October and Passover in April. The Jewish holiday best known to Americans, however, is the minor holiday Hannukah, which is celebrated in December. Hannukah’s temporal proximity to Christmas made it the only festive contender to put up against the Christian juggernaut. The outcome of this contest was a foregone conclusion and this was for several reasons. Christmas is a major holiday; Hannukah, a minor one. The stories behind the two holidays are of a different order of importance altogether. Hannukah celebrates the miracle of a one-day oil supply of the newly rededicated Temple of Jerusalem’s menorah, feeding the sacred flame for eight days. It’s cool enough as miracles go but not as dramatic as parting the Red Sea or walking on water. Furthermore, Christmas celebrates THE BIRTH OF THE MESSIAH WHO HAS COME TO SAVE ALL MANKIND! -- a religious rock star. We Jews are still waiting for our Messiah. Once again, a distinct lack of drama. Furthermore, America’s version of Hannukah got hyped in direct response to the invention of Christmas at the end of the 19th century. Two Cincinnati rabbis, hugely influential promoters of Reform Judaism, saw that we needed something to offer the kids to keep them in the fold. The main draw was all the Christmas loot. We couldn’t justify the lavish expenditures of an increasingly prosperous and urbanized middle class (and as Jews, we weren’t that rich yet), but we spaced our gift-giving out over the eight days of Hanukkah. Compare one gift a day to the riot of wrapped presents to be torn through on Christmas morning. Lighting the menorah candles possesses a pleasing ritual gravitas, but what is that to a kid compared to trimming a fir tree with bulbs and tinsel? Every newly unwrapped toy testifies to the bounty of Christmas. What do we have at Hannukah? – sad little dreidel games accompanied by the sad little dreidel song. “Dreidel dreidel dreidel, I made it out of clay/And when it’s dry and ready, dreidel I will play.” That doesn’t stand up against any Christmas carol. Quite unfairly, all the Currier and Ives winter imagery gets associated with Christmas, not Hanukkah. (Imagine those Central Park skaters in black caftans and fur hats, women on one side and men on the other.) “Jingle Bells” is not a Christmas song, and yet it gets thrown in with paeans to the Baby Jesus. And just when Hannukah is down for the count, America’s Teutonic heritage provides the coup de grace – Santa Claus, the flying reindeer, the huge sack of presents. And yet . . . Jewish difference, the refusal to submit to cultural or physical extinction, manifests itself once again. We put our indelible stamp on the culture. Practically all of the great Christmas songs were written by Jews: “White Christmas” (Israel Beilin), “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” (Hugh Martin), “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” (Walter Kaufman), and the poison pill that may ultimately kill Christmas in a better future, “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (John David Marks). --Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal experience into this foray in Unplugging from Christmas SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Raising her family in a newly-created suburban neighborhood on a Pasadena mesa during the 1950s, my mother always knew she was a square peg in a round hole. For a long time, we were the only Jewish family on the block, the street, and probably the whole damn mesa. But almost as bad was the fact that my parents were Democrats and made no secret of it. While driving to a neighborhood party (there were plenty of those in the 50s and 60s), my mother querulously remarked, "I wonder why we're invited. They don't like our politics, and I'm sure they don't like Jews." "They have to," my father replied, "or they'll lose their federal funding." The linkage of Jewishness to commie proclivities was hardly new to the neighbors. While they may not have known the particulars of history, they'd probably heard the recognizably Jewish names of Rosa Luxemburg, Julius, and Ethel Rosenberg, and wasn't Karl Marx himself a Jew? Nobody explained how a cabal of Jews directed capitalism from behind the scenes on the one hand while working for the victory of communism on the other, but this diffuse antisemitism was rarely put under a spotlight and so never needed to leave the shadows of innuendo and prejudice. One of our right-wing neighbors, an early member of the John Birch Society, tried to alert the authorities that my father, who occasionally attended scientific conferences (he was consulting polymer chemist) behind the Iron Curtain, was in all probability a Soviet informer but was frustrated in his patriotic duty by the fact that the CIA had already asked my father to debrief them about those same conferences and went with their blessing. In the spring of 1966, the escalating catastrophe of the Vietnam War ruined or ended the lives of ever greater numbers of young American men, and since the Establishment (as we called it then) hadn't yet realized that you could fling your troops in harm's way with impunity if they were poor or colored or both, the draft was universal and imperiled the children of the middle class as well. (The rich always found a way to get around it; pace George Bush.) My brother, born in 1946, was required to register with the local draft board in 1964 when he turned 18. (My turn came in 1968.) There were escape hatches to being sent into this senseless slaughter, most notably the student deferment offered to those who were enrolled in higher education. In 1966, my brother was in his second year of attending Pasadena City College. In May of that year, a neighbor ("a good Democrat,") informed my mother that the talk at a ladies' luncheon had turned to the draft and the danger it posed to their boys. Unprovoked, one woman piped up, "Well, Amy doesn't have to worry. David will never be drafted because he's a communist." Here, I let my mother pick up the tale: The ladies pooh-poohed her, saying that they have known us a long time and all are impressed with Joe's secret confidential super security clearance, and they have always known that we are liberal Democrats and they are almost used to it. When she was questioned, this dumb dame said that she knew David was a communist because she had worked at the US employment office and when David had filled out his application, he had written on it that he was a communist. Mother was aghast at the gossip. My parents had lived through the McCarthy era and knew that if the label stuck, David might find it impossible to get work, and it could have even threatened my father's security clearance. So I decided to do battle and stop it right there. I realized that she was lying foolishly, for there is nothing on a federal application to show race, creed, color, church, etc. I telephoned the supervisor of the office in Pasadena and told him the story. He turned out to be a nice guy and was horrified. That kind of question was against the law anyway. Then he told me I could see the file, which was absolutely clean. Now I had her. She lied about his having put his name to be "that thing," and so I went to work. I telephoned her best friend, who had been at the party, and told her what had happened and expressed sorrowfully that I was considering a libel suit and was, of course, going to talk with Joe and our lawyer. I was terribly sorry, but I was sick of being talked about and really decided to see it through this time. As I hoped, the woman I called got in touch with my antagonist and told her I was sore and had proof she had lied. Then, I did nothing for a week so that the rumor would spread of what she had done and how I had checked her. It worked like I was a professional. I finally telephoned her and said I wanted to see her—that she had said something quite damaging about David and I wanted to get to the bottom of it. I was very nice. When we got together, she was a shaking mass of apologies. Yes, she had said that about David, didn't know why, for they always liked us and she wouldn't do anything in the world to hurt us (like fun) and she was so sorry, so sorry. She also said that the rumor didn't come from anyone—that she had started it. She told me the story would stop there and she would call the people at the party. I was very nice and forgave her and said I was sorry too and this was a good lesson the whole neighborhood would learn for a long time to come. But even though my mother had emerged victorious, it hurt her too, proving yet again (as if we needed it) that we could easily be targeted for our "difference." You know, I had a feeling of relief, gratitude, pity and was also a little sick to my stomach. In so many ways this is such a magnificent country and these people want to tear it down and destroy us. This name-calling is a bad business and I am glad I followed it through, but it took a lot out of me. Nobody wants to start a fight. I'm glad she's dead and doesn't have to witness this awful renewal of antisemitism and liberal vilification. – Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The Evilest Queer Jew in America SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

A panel from the AIDS quilt The list of evil queer Jews with any sort of public profile isn't long, but Roy Cohn, lawyer to the worst actors in mid-20th century America, amoral snake, and Svengali to Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump, easily comes out on top. (Although he was a bottom in his drug-and-money-fueled pursuit of the handsome blond men who tickled his fancy.)I had some hazy knowledge of Roy Cohn before the AIDS crisis because my father was vehemently against McCarthyism and all it stood for, fueling his hatred not only of "Tail Gunner Joe" but other slimy opportunists who used the Red Scare to further their political careers, notably Richard Nixon.Interestingly -- and this is little commented upon -- Cohn's homosexual proclivities landed McCarthy in the hot water that finally scalded his seemingly impenetrable skin. Cohn became infatuated with a rich, handsome young anti-communist crusader, G. David Schine, whom he brought onto McCarthy's staff as an unpaid "chief consultant." Though Schine was straight and probably never returned Cohn's sexual interest, that didn't stop the young lawyer from conducting a campaign of hectoring telephone calls and threats to military officials when Schine was drafted into the army.  The military refused to grant Private Schine special privileges, and Cohn, maddened by encountering an entity that wouldn't cave, vowed to "wreck the Army" if his demands were not met. This led to the Army-McCarthy hearings, which exposed the senator's dishonest, bullying tactics before a wide television audience. (The Army's defense attorney publicly shamed McCarthy by angrily demanding, "Have you no decency?" -- a tactic that would get no traction in these postlapsarian times.) Losing his credibility, McCarthy was censured in the Senate and drank himself to death three years later.  All the while, Cohn and McCarthy destroyed the lives and careers of numerous homosexuals in a collateral Lavender Scare because, of course, identified sex perverts were susceptible to blackmail and had to be stamped out as yet another security risk. Leaving a disgraced McCarthy and having inflicted incalculable damage upon the struggling and inchoate gay community, Cohn returned to private practice as a New York attorney. Because I wasn't a mafia don (Carmine Galante) or following the antics of the uber-rich (Aristotle Onassis), the extremely corrupt (Roger Stone), and the rampant avariciousness of the rising fascist elite (he introduced Trump to Rupert Murdoch in the 1970s), I wasn't aware of Cohn's poisonous but extremely lucrative calling as lawyer and advisor to the richest dregs of humanity. On some level, I knew that Cohn was a faggot. When he died of AIDS in 1986, protesting loudly to the end that he was afflicted with liver cancer, I consigned him to the same bin of self-hating homosexuals as Liberace and Freddie Mercury. Still, it was a shock to run across the panel in the AIDS quilt that some compassionate individual had fashioned for this rotted disaster whose evil against homosexuals surpassed even that of the gay Nazi, Ernst Röhm. But for another queer Jew, Tony Kushner, the life and death of Roy Cohn led to the monumental achievement of Angels In America, first performed in San Francisco in 1991. Kushner's portrayal of Cohn as a closeted, power-hungry hypocrite (a different kind of screaming queen) has seared him forever into the American consciousness (probably with greater humanity than he deserved). Through the medium of the play, Kushner brought other facets of Cohn's evils to light. In his delirium, he is confronted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, whom he prosecuted by extorting a false confession from her brother-in-law and who was executed after Cohn illegally lobbied the judge for the death penalty. "I'd have pulled the switch myself if they let me," Cohn brags in the play.  Cohn conducted his professional life as a closeted gay man (although his homosexuality was very much an open secret), but he couldn't run away from his Jewish identity. His name and origins in the affluent Jewish community of the Bronx marked him indelibly. He was a mama's boy, of course, but that's a condition shared by both gay men and Jews. In Cohn's case, Mama was even more of a warping influence on her only child than the usual run of such characters. Mother and son lived together until her death in 1967 and she was constantly attentive to his grades, appearance and relationships. When Cohn's father insisted that Roy be sent to a summer camp, his mother rented a house nearby. Predictably, after his mother's death, Cohn's frenzied promiscuity reached almost visible heights.  Writing that Cohn's sins finally caught up with him would be nice. In 1975, Cohn entered the hospital room of a dying and unconscious client, forced a pen into his hand, and applied it to a document appointing himself as executor. (The gambit didn't work.) He beat three trials for unethical and unprofessional conduct before finally being disbarred in 1986, but by that time, he was on his way out. He died at age 59, seemingly without remorse or any self-awareness. But how could he hate himself as much as others did?  In 1950, communists were identified with two minorities–Jews and homosexuals. Cohn was both. What better way to inoculate himself against the slanders he knew would be coming his way than by proving himself the most resolute of red baiters and acquiring enough clout to silence those who threatened to out him or subject him to antisemitism? He perfected the techniques of bullying and passed his playbook on to his mentee, Donald Trump: never admit wrongdoing, never apologize, and attack attack attack.  What a legacy!  --Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in My Mother Scotches A Communist Smear Campaign SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Nous quatre a Paris Jazz paved the way for the establishment of an African American expatriate community in Paris. The French were blown away by the syncopation introduced during World War I through the Harlem Hellfighters regimental band. African Americans were seen as musical, exotic, and paragons of entertainment. If you were already in France, faced with the choice of staying in a country that – naively perhaps – blew up your talents or returning to an America in the throes of the deadliest, most extended set of race riots in its history (the Red Summer of 1919) … well, only the pull of family and culture might bring you back home.  Warranted or not, Paris gained a sheen as a bastion of freedom for American Blacks. Countee Cullen expressed the deep appreciation for the respite from the unrelenting racism felt by many African Americans in a 1932 sonnet, “To France.”  As he whose eyes are gouged craves light to see, And he whose limbs are broken strength to run So have I sought in you that alchemy  That knits my bones and returns me to the sun And found across a continent of foam What was denied my hungry heart at home.  Many entertainers had a good run there. Some like Josephine Baker and Bricktop settled as permanent residents. Others, like Adelaide Hall, lived there for shorter periods. Clarinetist Sidney Bechet would have stayed in France longer than his first four-year stint, but after serving an eleven-month prison term for an accidental shooting of a woman during a brawl, he was deported. (The story ends happily. He eventually emigrated to France in 1951 after his performance as a soloist at the Paris Jazz Fair caused a surge in his popularity.)  As the interwar capital of the visual arts – as well as seedbed for any number of modernist movements – a sojourn in Paris immeasurably enhanced the techniques and reputations of those African American artists who managed to get there: Palmer Hayden, Hale Woodruff, Archibald Motley, Jr., and Augusta Savage.  The great obstacle encountered in expatriating oneself to France was the language. You didn’t necessarily need to master French in order to blow a clarinet, but you were likely to be living on the economic edge and not speaking French closed many doors. Langston Hughes spent six months in Montmartre in 1924 eking out a living as a cook and dishwasher. “Stay home!” he warned Countee Cullen in a letter.  Jobs in Paris are like needles in hay-stacks for everybody, and especially English-speaking foreigners. The city is over-run with Spaniards and Italians who work for nothing, literally nothing. And all French wages are low enough anyway. I've never in my life seen so many English and Americans, colored and white, male and female, broke and without a place to sleep as I have seen here.  Cullen didn’t listen. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1928, he lived a year in Paris working on his poetry, spent summers in France as often as he could, and, when he had to find a “day job” in 1934 to support his writing, did so as a French teacher in a Harlem junior high school.  Because of his appreciation for the visual arts, Cullen bridged both the literary and artistic community of Black visitors and expatriates. Hale Woodruff, perfecting modernist techniques during his French sojourn, daubed a famous painting of Cullen while the both were in Paris in 1928.  The transatlantic influence didn’t run just one way. The writings of the Harlem Renaissance served as an inspiration to the African and Caribbean leaders of the Negritude movement that came to birth in the 1930s. They were particularly appreciative of Claude McKay’s second novel, Banjo (1929) which manifested a fully pan-Africanist worldview, centering on a community of Black seamen in Marseilles and critiquing how the French treated people from its sub-Saharan colonies.  The deepening of the Great Depression forced many Black intellectuals, notably McKay himself, back to America where a change of zeitgeist and economic hard times had drained the Harlem Renaissance of its vitality.  That was not the end of the story, however. One of Countee Cullen’s students at Frederick Douglass Junior High was James Baldwin who matriculated there from 1935 to 38. Perhaps le bon professeur taught him more than just French … Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's experience into this foray in A Basset in Paris

HUMAN NATURE OR AFRICAN DEPRAVITY? It’s all depressingly familiar: an artificially cobbled state created under colonialism explodes in tribal/sectarian violence. Men and young boys indiscriminately shoot and maim whoever gets in their path, women, children, innocent bystanders, one another. The world cries in horror; insufficient troops from the outside may or may not be sent in to protect the capital and its airport; the slaughter continues; world leaders point fingers and counsel moderation; millions of lives are blasted and disrupted; refugees huddle, flee, starve, provide horrific images for Western news consumption. Yes, we’ve seen the like amongst white people (a tear for Yugoslavia), but surely that was an anomaly! This kind of savagery is endemic to the African continent, isn’t it? Not to be racist about it, but … What’s the difference between the sectarian violence now being visited upon that perennial basket case of a country, the Central African Republic (even the name testifies to its artificial nature) and Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Sudan? Only my personal history, for I was a Peace Corps Volunteer and lived there from 1974 to 1977. The high school in which I taught is now a refugee camp for 8,000 Muslims too terrified to return to their homes, many now destroyed or burnt out. Another 35,000 Christian refugees are massed around the Catholic mission in the town’s center. Bossangoa, formerly a peaceable savannah subprefecture of 50,000 people, is now a string of blackened buildings. The thing I find most shocking about this turn of events is that when I lived there in the mid-70s, there was no whisper of the sectarian hatred that has how turned this country into a cauldron of violence. Tribal rivalries there were aplenty and then dictator Jean-Bedel Bokassa provided a colorful twist on the usual narrative of a cardboard democracy, installed by the departing colonial powers, overturned by a military dictator. (Bokassa brought unusual notoriety to his fiefdom by declaring himself emperor and staging a shockingly opulent coronation modeled on that of Napoleon.) Muslims had always been a quiescent trading minority (barely 15%) in this country of mostly Christians and animists. If I were placing bets at that time on who would be hacking whom, Muslims vs. Christians would have been low on the list. HOW DID WE GET HERE? Beats me, but I have a theory. You may have noticed that for the past couple of decades, the Muslim world has been “waking up,” if you will, from its centuries of sleep. This has included all manner of unpleasantness from bombings in Mumbai (Lashkar-e-Taiba) to church killings in Nigeria (Boko Haram). You might not have pegged the Central African Republic as a likely domino in the spread of Allah-inspired violence, but the C.A.R.’s immediate neighbor to the north, Chad, and to the east, Sudan, were very much roiled by Islamic fighters. These battle-hardened men made up an available pool of thuggery for the ambitions of the C.A.R.’s first Muslim “politician” of note, Michel Djotodia. I put the word “politician” in quotes because even though the Western-imposed form of putative democracy is sometimes sketched out as the playing field, the actual struggle for power and the ability to rape the country’s meager resources plays out in a bewildering round of coups, failed coups, sabotaged elections, rebellions, and worthless peace deals featuring the same names – Patassé, Kolingba, Goumba, Bozizé – in endless competition for Supreme Kleptocrat, aka the President. As you might imagine, orderly rule of a country the size of France was always beyond the capability of this turbulent, self-immolating central power. Djotodia, though ambitious for the Presidency, was always a 2nd tier rider on this merry-go-round until the Muslim turmoil of the neighboring states really revved up. He became a key leader in a coalition of Muslim fighters called the Séléka, which means “alliance” in Sango, the country’s lingua franca. In 2013, the Séléka quickly overran the country’s army, invaded the capital, Bangui, and installed Djotodia as President. Then the wholesale killing, raping and pillage of Christians, unarmed at this point, began in earnest. Djotodia proved incapable of rebottling the bloodthirsty genii he had let loose, and the sickening carnage finally rose to the level of global visibility via the Western press. The balance of power teetered back toward the Christian majority, not because they turned the other cheek but because they formed their own, equally arbitrary and bloodthirsty lynch mobs, called the Anti-Balaka (“anti-machete”). Djotodia tried to disband the Séléka, but that only sent the mercenaries out into the bush where their violence and pillage went completely unchecked as they made their way back home. That left the hapless Muslim resident minority at the tender mercies of an enraged decentralized Christian militia. Under internal and external pressure, Djotodia resigned as President January and went into a peaceful and unrepentant exile in the Republic of Benin. What he has left in his wake is a country that is, as the U.N. has declared, on the verge of genocide. THE HOARY CANARD RETURNS As I contemplate this ravaged landscape from afar, I prefer not to think about the fates of former colleagues and students. I lost touch with my Central African friends long ago. Who would have guessed that the 10-year reign of the buffoonish Bokossa would constitute a Golden Age of stability? There was plenty of fear and corruption when I lived there but no widespread violence, and even the streets of Bangui were safe at night. This all deteriorated as Bokassa, driven mad by unchecked power, descended into full-blown megalomania. His $20-million coronation, costing a full quarter of the country’s pathetic GDP, fuelled a popular unrest that first manifested itself in a 1979 revolt of schoolchildren who refused to purchase uniforms made in a factory “owned” by one of his 19 wives. During the street riots that followed, Bokassa was accused not only of personally supervising the massacre of 100 schoolchildren but of cannibalism! Shortly after the school protests, the French magazine Paris Match published photos allegedly showing fridges containing bodies of children. That was proof enough, and, in fact, when Bokassa was put on trial for treason and murder in 1986, cannibalism was one the charges. (He was cleared of that due to lack of evidence.) Cannibalism? Now? In the harsh glare of our present-day knowledge? Recent and current dictators, the Kim Jong Ils, the Pol Pots, the Muammar Kaddafis, have their little sanguinary foibles, but only African dictators get tarred with accusations of cannibalism. Because, you know, they’re Africans, and Africans do that. And guess what? The hoary canard returns. In January the media lit up with the story (and photos – I’ll spare you the link) of a young Central African known as Mad Dog on the streets of Bangui eating from the body of a lynched Muslim. THE TAKE-AWAY It’s easy to condemn all of this from the comfort and safety of the American middle class. What the Central Africans taught me was the reality of my white male privilege. God willing, I’ll never see my home destroyed, my family raped and slaughtered, my own body mutilated by neighbors and acquaintances following the lead of some bloodthirsty demagogue. That might drive me to equally violent paroxysms of vengeance (I know how angry Americans can get behind the wheel of a car), but I’ll never be tested in such a manner. Outside of donations to Medecins sans frontiers, doing heroic work in the C.A.R., there is little I care to do. My life has moved on. My Central African days date from almost 40 years ago. Still, I cannot help but follow the news from the C.A.R. with unusual interest and a phantom sense of connection. The fitful spotlight of Western media will move to fresher catastrophes, and the tragic parody of nation-statehood that the French contrived in their effort to extract diamonds and hardwoods from that part of Africa will thrash about at even lower levels of desperate survival or splinter into of fiefdoms of local power. The Central African Republic was a failed state from its moment of birth. And yet, the country was beautiful, the people were lovely, and their misfortunes were never solely self-inflicted. There but for the grace of God, go I. Au revoir mon beau pays de souvenir.